OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Decentralized Personalization for Federated Medical Image Segmentation via Gossip Contrastive Mutual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2025
Year: 2025

Federated Learning (FL) presents a promising avenue for collaborative model training among medical centers, facilitating knowledge exchange without compromising data privacy. However, vanilla FL is prone to server failures and rarely achieves optimal performance on all participating sites due to heterogeneous data distributions among them. To overcome these challenges, we propose Gossip Contrastive Mutual Learning (GCML), a unified framework to optimize personalized models in a decentralized environment, where Gossip Protocol is employed for flexible and robust peer-to-peer communication. To make efficient and reliable knowledge exchange in each communication without the global knowledge across all the sites, we introduce deep contrast mutual learning (DCML), a simple yet effective scheme to encourage knowledge transfer between the incoming and local models through collaborative training on local data. By integrating DCML with other efforts to optimize site-specific models by leveraging useful information from peers, we evaluated the performance and efficiency of the proposed method on three publicly available datasets with different segmentation tasks. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed GCML framework outperformed both centralized and decentralized FL methods with significantly reduced communication overhead, indicating its potential for real-world deployment. Upon the acceptance of manuscript, the code will be available at: https://github.com/CUMC-Yuan-Lab/GCML.
Pretrained LLMs as Real-Time Controllers for Robot Operated Serial Production Line
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

The manufacturing industry is undergoing a transformative shift, driven by cutting-edge technologies like 5G, AI, and cloud computing. Despite these advancements, effective system control, which is crucial for optimizing production efficiency, remains a complex challenge due to the intricate, knowledge-dependent nature of manufacturing processes and the reliance on domain-specific expertise. Conventional control methods often demand heavy customization, considerable computational resources, and lack transparency in decision-making. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of using Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly GPT-4, as a straightforward, adaptable solution for controlling manufacturing systems, specifically, mobile robot scheduling. We introduce an LLM-based control framework to assign mobile robots to different machines in robot assisted serial production lines, evaluating its performance in terms of system throughput. Our proposed framework outperforms traditional scheduling approaches such as First-Come-First-Served (FCFS), Shortest Processing Time (SPT), and Longest Processing Time (LPT). While it achieves performance that is on par with state-of-the-art methods like Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), it offers a distinct advantage by delivering comparable throughput without the need for extensive retraining. These results suggest that the proposed LLM-based solution is well-suited for scenarios where technical expertise, computational resources, and financial investment are limited, while decision transparency and system scalability are critical concerns.
Parser Knows Best: Testing DBMS with Coverage-Guided Grammar-Rule Traversal
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Database Management System (DBMS) is the key component for data-intensive applications. Recently, researchers propose many tools to comprehensively test DBMS systems for finding various bugs. However, these tools only cover a small subset of diverse syntax elements defined in DBMS-specific SQL dialects, leaving a large number of features unexplored. In this paper, we propose ParserFuzz, a novel fuzzing framework that automatically extracts grammar rules from DBMSs' built-in syntax definition files for SQL query generation. Without any input corpus, ParserFuzz can generate diverse query statements to saturate the grammar features of the tested DBMSs, which grammar features could be missed by previous tools. Additionally, ParserFuzz utilizes code coverage as feedback to guide the query mutation, which combines different DBMS features extracted from the syntax rules to find more function and safety bugs. In our evaluation, ParserFuzz outperforms all state-of-the-art existing DBMS testing tools in terms of bug finding, grammar rule coverage and code coverage. ParserFuzz detects 81 previously unknown bugs in total across 5 popular DBMSs, where all bugs are confirmed and 34 have been fixed.
On the Convergence of Adam-Type Algorithm for Bilevel Optimization under Unbounded Smoothness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Adam has become one of the most popular optimizers for training modern deep neural networks, such as transformers. However, its applicability is largely restricted to single-level optimization problems. In this paper, we aim to extend vanilla Adam to tackle bilevel optimization problems, which have important applications in machine learning, such as meta-learning. In particular, we study stochastic bilevel optimization problems where the lower-level function is strongly convex and the upper-level objective is nonconvex with potentially unbounded smoothness. This unbounded smooth objective function covers a broad class of neural networks, including transformers, which may exhibit non-Lipschitz gradients. In this work, we introduce AdamBO, a single-loop Adam-type method that achieves $\widetilde{O}(ε^{-4})$ oracle complexity to find $ε$-stationary points, where the oracle calls involve stochastic gradient or Hessian/Jacobian-vector product evaluations. The key to our analysis is a novel randomness decoupling lemma that provides refined control over the lower-level variable. We conduct extensive experiments on various machine learning tasks involving bilevel formulations with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and transformers, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed Adam-type algorithm.
SurgiSAM2: Fine-tuning a foundational model for surgical video anatomy segmentation and detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Background: We evaluate SAM 2 for surgical scene understanding by examining its semantic segmentation capabilities for organs/tissues both in zero-shot scenarios and after fine-tuning. Methods: We utilized five public datasets to evaluate and fine-tune SAM 2 for segmenting anatomical tissues in surgical videos/images. Fine-tuning was applied to the image encoder and mask decoder. We limited training subsets from 50 to 400 samples per class to better model real-world constraints with data acquisition. The impact of dataset size on fine-tuning performance was evaluated with weighted mean Dice coefficient (WMDC), and the results were also compared against previously reported state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Results: SurgiSAM 2, a fine-tuned SAM 2 model, demonstrated significant improvements in segmentation performance, achieving a 17.9% relative WMDC gain compared to the baseline SAM 2. Increasing prompt points from 1 to 10 and training data scale from 50/class to 400/class enhanced performance; the best WMDC of 0.92 on the validation subset was achieved with 10 prompt points and 400 samples per class. On the test subset, this model outperformed prior SOTA methods in 24/30 (80%) of the classes with a WMDC of 0.91 using 10-point prompts. Notably, SurgiSAM 2 generalized effectively to unseen organ classes, achieving SOTA on 7/9 (77.8%) of them. Conclusion: SAM 2 achieves remarkable zero-shot and fine-tuned performance for surgical scene segmentation, surpassing prior SOTA models across several organ classes of diverse datasets. This suggests immense potential for enabling automated/semi-automated annotation pipelines, thereby decreasing the burden of annotations facilitating several surgical applications.
GuardDoor: Safeguarding Against Malicious Diffusion Editing via Protective Backdoors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

The growing accessibility of diffusion models has revolutionized image editing but also raised significant concerns about unauthorized modifications, such as misinformation and plagiarism. Existing countermeasures largely rely on adversarial perturbations designed to disrupt diffusion model outputs. However, these approaches are found to be easily neutralized by simple image preprocessing techniques, such as compression and noise addition. To address this limitation, we propose GuardDoor, a novel and robust protection mechanism that fosters collaboration between image owners and model providers. Specifically, the model provider participating in the mechanism fine-tunes the image encoder to embed a protective backdoor, allowing image owners to request the attachment of imperceptible triggers to their images. When unauthorized users attempt to edit these protected images with this diffusion model, the model produces meaningless outputs, reducing the risk of malicious image editing. Our method demonstrates enhanced robustness against image preprocessing operations and is scalable for large-scale deployment. This work underscores the potential of cooperative frameworks between model providers and image owners to safeguard digital content in the era of generative AI.
Preliminary Report: Enhancing Role Differentiation in Conversational HCI Through Chromostereopsis
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

We propose leveraging chromostereopsis, a perceptual phenomenon inducing depth perception through color contrast, as a novel approach to visually differentiating conversational roles in text-based AI interfaces. This method aims to implicitly communicate role hierarchy and add a subtle sense of physical space.
USBSnoop -- Revealing Device Activities via USB Congestions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

The USB protocol has become a ubiquitous standard for connecting peripherals to computers, making its security a critical concern. A recent research study demonstrated the potential to exploit weaknesses in well-established protocols, such as PCIe, and created a side-channel for leaking sensitive information by leveraging congestion within shared interfaces. Drawing inspiration from that, this project introduces an innovative approach to USB side-channel attacks via congestion. We evaluated the susceptibility of USB devices and hubs to remote profiling and side-channel attacks, identified potential weaknesses within the USB standard, and highlighted the critical need for heightened security and privacy in USB technology. Our findings discover vulnerabilities within the USB standard, which are difficult to effectively mitigate and underscore the need for enhanced security measures to protect user privacy in an era increasingly dependent on USB-connected devices.
Beyond Existance: Fulfill 3D Reconstructed Scenes with Pseudo Details
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2025
Year: 2025

The emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has significantly advanced 3D reconstruction by providing high fidelity and fast training speeds across various scenarios. While recent efforts have mainly focused on improving model structures to compress data volume or reduce artifacts during zoom-in and zoom-out operations, they often overlook an underlying issue: training sampling deficiency. In zoomed-in views, Gaussian primitives can appear unregulated and distorted due to their dilation limitations and the insufficient availability of scale-specific training samples. Consequently, incorporating pseudo-details that ensure the completeness and alignment of the scene becomes essential. In this paper, we introduce a new training method that integrates diffusion models and multi-scale training using pseudo-ground-truth data. This approach not only notably mitigates the dilation and zoomed-in artifacts but also enriches reconstructed scenes with precise details out of existing scenarios. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks and extends the capabilities of 3D reconstruction beyond training datasets.
LLMs Can Generate a Better Answer by Aggregating Their Own Responses
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across tasks, yet they often require additional prompting techniques when facing complex problems. While approaches like self-correction and response selection have emerged as popular solutions, recent studies have shown these methods perform poorly when relying on the LLM itself to provide feedback or selection criteria. We argue this limitation stems from the fact that common LLM post-training procedures lack explicit supervision for discriminative judgment tasks. In this paper, we propose Generative Self-Aggregation (GSA), a novel prompting method that improves answer quality without requiring the model's discriminative capabilities. GSA first samples multiple diverse responses from the LLM, then aggregates them to obtain an improved solution. Unlike previous approaches, our method does not require the LLM to correct errors or compare response quality; instead, it leverages the model's generative abilities to synthesize a new response based on the context of multiple samples. While GSA shares similarities with the self-consistency (SC) approach for response aggregation, SC requires specific verifiable tokens to enable majority voting. In contrast, our approach is more general and can be applied to open-ended tasks. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that GSA effectively improves response quality across various tasks, including mathematical reasoning, knowledge-based problems, and open-ended generation tasks such as code synthesis and conversational responses.
Diff-Reg v2: Diffusion-Based Matching Matrix Estimation for Image Matching and 3D Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Establishing reliable correspondences is crucial for all registration tasks, including 2D image registration, 3D point cloud registration, and 2D-3D image-to-point cloud registration. However, these tasks are often complicated by challenges such as scale inconsistencies, symmetry, and large deformations, which can lead to ambiguous matches. Previous feature-based and correspondence-based methods typically rely on geometric or semantic features to generate or polish initial potential correspondences. Some methods typically leverage specific geometric priors, such as topological preservation, to devise diverse and innovative strategies tailored to a given enhancement goal, which cannot be exhaustively enumerated. Additionally, many previous approaches rely on a single-step prediction head, which can struggle with local minima in complex matching scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce an innovative paradigm that leverages a diffusion model in matrix space for robust matching matrix estimation. Our model treats correspondence estimation as a denoising diffusion process in the matching matrix space, gradually refining the intermediate matching matrix to the optimal one. Specifically, we apply the diffusion model in the doubly stochastic matrix space for 3D-3D and 2D-3D registration tasks. In the 2D image registration task, we deploy the diffusion model in a matrix subspace where dual-softmax projection regularization is applied. For all three registration tasks, we provide adaptive matching matrix embedding implementations tailored to the specific characteristics of each task while maintaining a consistent "match-to-warp" encoding pattern. Furthermore, we adopt a lightweight design for the denoising module. In inference, once points or image features are extracted and fixed, this module performs multi-step denoising predictions through reverse sampling.
Mixed Likelihood Variational Gaussian Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Gaussian processes (GPs) are powerful models for human-in-the-loop experiments due to their flexibility and well-calibrated uncertainty. However, GPs modeling human responses typically ignore auxiliary information, including a priori domain expertise and non-task performance information like user confidence ratings. We propose mixed likelihood variational GPs to leverage auxiliary information, which combine multiple likelihoods in a single evidence lower bound to model multiple types of data. We demonstrate the benefits of mixing likelihoods in three real-world experiments with human participants. First, we use mixed likelihood training to impose prior knowledge constraints in GP classifiers, which accelerates active learning in a visual perception task where users are asked to identify geometric errors resulting from camera position errors in virtual reality. Second, we show that leveraging Likert scale confidence ratings by mixed likelihood training improves model fitting for haptic perception of surface roughness. Lastly, we show that Likert scale confidence ratings improve human preference learning in robot gait optimization. The modeling performance improvements found using our framework across this diverse set of applications illustrates the benefits of incorporating auxiliary information into active learning and preference learning by using mixed likelihoods to jointly model multiple inputs.
HEISIR: Hierarchical Expansion of Inverted Semantic Indexing for Training-free Retrieval of Conversational Data using LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

The growth of conversational AI services has increased demand for effective information retrieval from dialogue data. However, existing methods often face challenges in capturing semantic intent or require extensive labeling and fine-tuning. This paper introduces HEISIR (Hierarchical Expansion of Inverted Semantic Indexing for Retrieval), a novel framework that enhances semantic understanding in conversational data retrieval through optimized data ingestion, eliminating the need for resource-intensive labeling or model adaptation. HEISIR implements a two-step process: (1) Hierarchical Triplets Formulation and (2) Adjunct Augmentation, creating semantic indices consisting of Subject-Verb-Object-Adjunct (SVOA) quadruplets. This structured representation effectively captures the underlying semantic information from dialogue content. HEISIR achieves high retrieval performance while maintaining low latency during the actual retrieval process. Our experimental results demonstrate that HEISIR outperforms fine-tuned models across various embedding types and language models. Beyond improving retrieval capabilities, HEISIR also offers opportunities for intent and topic analysis in conversational data, providing a versatile solution for dialogue systems.
Unseen Fake News Detection Through Casual Debiasing
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2025
Year: 2025

The widespread dissemination of fake news on social media poses significant risks, necessitating timely and accurate detection. However, existing methods struggle with unseen news due to their reliance on training data from past events and domains, leaving the challenge of detecting novel fake news largely unresolved. To address this, we identify biases in training data tied to specific domains and propose a debiasing solution FNDCD. Originating from causal analysis, FNDCD employs a reweighting strategy based on classification confidence and propagation structure regularization to reduce the influence of domain-specific biases, enhancing the detection of unseen fake news. Experiments on real-world datasets with non-overlapping news domains demonstrate FNDCD's effectiveness in improving generalization across domains.
Geometric Re-Analysis of Classical MDP Solving Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

We build on a recently introduced geometric interpretation of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to analyze classical MDP-solving algorithms: Value Iteration (VI) and Policy Iteration (PI). First, we develop a geometry-based analytical apparatus, including a transformation that modifies the discount factor $γ$, to improve convergence guarantees for these algorithms in several settings. In particular, one of our results identifies a rotation component in the VI method, and as a consequence shows that when a Markov Reward Process (MRP) induced by the optimal policy is irreducible and aperiodic, the asymptotic convergence rate of value iteration is strictly smaller than $γ$.
Bi-Lipschitz Ansatz for Anti-Symmetric Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Motivated by applications for simulating quantum many body functions, we propose a new universal ansatz for approximating anti-symmetric functions. The main advantage of this ansatz over previous alternatives is that it is bi-Lipschitz with respect to a naturally defined metric. As a result, we are able to obtain quantitative approximation results for approximation of Lipschitz continuous antisymmetric functions. Moreover, we provide preliminary experimental evidence to the improved performance of this ansatz for learning antisymmetric functions.
Prompt Programming: A Platform for Dialogue-based Computational Problem Solving with Generative AI Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2025
Year: 2025

Computing students increasingly rely on generative AI tools for programming assistance, often without formal instruction or guidance. This highlights a need to teach students how to effectively interact with AI models, particularly through natural language prompts, to generate and critically evaluate code for solving computational tasks. To address this, we developed a novel platform for prompt programming that enables authentic dialogue-based interactions, supports problems involving multiple interdependent functions, and offers on-request execution of generated code. Data analysis from over 900 students in an introductory programming course revealed high engagement, with the majority of prompts occurring within multi-turn dialogues. Problems with multiple interdependent functions encouraged iterative refinement, with progression graphs highlighting several common strategies. Students were highly selective about the code they chose to test, suggesting that on-request execution of generated code promoted critical thinking. Given the growing importance of learning dialogue-based programming with AI, we provide this tool as a publicly accessible resource, accompanied by a corpus of programming problems for educational use.
ControlFill: Spatially Adjustable Image Inpainting from Prompt Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In this report, I present an inpainting framework named \textit{ControlFill}, which involves training two distinct prompts: one for generating plausible objects within a designated mask (\textit{creation}) and another for filling the region by extending the background (\textit{removal}). During the inference stage, these learned embeddings guide a diffusion network that operates without requiring heavy text encoders. By adjusting the relative significance of the two prompts and employing classifier-free guidance, users can control the intensity of removal or creation. Furthermore, I introduce a method to spatially vary the intensity of guidance by assigning different scales to individual pixels.